Lauren Bateman breaks down guitar pick thickness for beginners: light (0.50-0.60 mm), medium (0.73-0.88 mm), and heavy (1.14 mm). She recommends textured Tortex picks over smooth Fender thin picks, which break and slip easily, and demonstrates how pick weight changes your strumming sound.
If you're just getting started with playing the guitar, one of the biggest questions I get asked by beginner guitar players is learn what is the best pick to use, particularly if you're playing acoustic guitar. So I'm going to tell you my pick recommendations in this video, but also what picks you should absolutely be avoiding at all costs, particularly if you're an acoustic beginner guitar player.
So before we get into which picks I recommend and which ones I want you to stay away from, for sure, I just want to go over the three different types of thicknesses of picks. So we have what we call light gauge picks, medium gauge picks, and heavy gauge picks. So these two I'm holding in my hand here are Dunlop Tortex. These are what we call light gauge picks. They're very, very flexible. I'll show you in a second. This is 0.50 mm and 0.60 mm, and they're very, very flexible. I'm going to take the thinnest one. And you can probably see I can just bend this thing like no tomorrow. It's so super flexible. And that's why it's very thin or light gauge. All right, so that's option one. Option two is what we call a medium gauge pick. So these ones are 0.73, 0.88. Okay. So that's a medium gauge pick. So there's still some flexibility in these picks, but they're a little bit stiffer. And then you can get really thick picks, which we call heavy gauge picks. And you can see it's really hard for me to bend these picks. They're not very flexible, they're very stiff. Now, the reason I like these Dunlop Tortex picks is because they're not very smooth. I don't know if you can see this guitar pick I'm holding up. This is a Fender thin pick. Again, very flexible, but it's very smooth. There's no coating on this pick. So if I hold the pick and I pull hard enough, I can really pull this pick out of my hand. So they fall on the floor a little easier than these. These have a little bit of a roughness to them, but not too much. And I can't see. I'm actually pulling really hard. I had to use a lot more force to pull this pick out of my hand, and that's why I like these picks. I also like them, they're the Tortex picks because they do have a slight curve to their shape, which is great for strumming. So I love that. And you'll see here I went back to the light gauge pick. So there's going to be two things I'm going to talk about for beginner guitar players, particularly acoustic guitar and strumming. What you're going to look for in a guitar pick and flexibility is definitely a key component. Now you can get guitar picks thinner than this, they make them lighter. I like these ones. I think if you go too much thinner, the thing with a thin pick is it's more likely to wear down faster or break. This one right here, this, this Fender pick, I broken these picks tons of times when I started playing. And the reason is because when you first start playing guitar, your wrist is so stiff. So a lot of times when you're strumming, the thickness of the pick will make your strumming either sound okay or horrendous. Let me show you an example. I'm going to take the lightest gauge pick, which is the 0.50, and I'm going to compare it with my heaviest pick, the 1.14. So here's the light gauge pick that I recommend for beginner acoustic guitar players. Okay, so I'm just going to play this. I'm going to strum my guitar and I'm going to use a good amount of force and then I'm going to switch to the thick pick and I want you to hear the difference.
So that was the light pick. Here's the heavy gauge pick. Same amount of pressure.
Okay. You probably heard, heard that the guitar sounded a lot harsher the second time than the first time. And again, the reason for this is this flexibility. Because your wrist is usually so stiff in the beginning, if you use a really stiff thick pick, a heavy pick, it's not going to rebound on your strumming. So by using a flexible pick, even if your wrist is really tight, it's a little bit more forgiving, which is great for acoustic guitar players because we are strumming so much. Now, as your wrist loosens up, you may want to go more to a medium sized pick. You'll get a little less pick noise. And as your wrist loosens up, if you want to go between strumming and picking, having a little bit more of a thicker pick makes doing picking patterns a little bit more easier than if you had a light pick because it is so flexible. Now there's one more consideration that I kind of already talked about a little bit, and that is the grip of the pick. And for beginners, like I said, I don't recommend those really glossy, shiny ones, but if you're someone who feels like your pick is falling out of your hand all the time, I highly recommend these Dunlop Max grip picks. They come in different gauges, so you could get them in light gauge and the back of the pick. The front and back where you would hold your thumb is. It feels like sandpaper. So to pull this out of your hand, I really, I mean, I have to pull this even harder than I couldn't even pull it out of my head that time. So the bottom line is because this has a rough surface, it's super hard for these picks to fall out of your hand. So if you want to combine both of these aspects, you could get a light pick with a Max grip. Some people don't like the extra texture. All right. You may not want that much texture on your fingertips. And that's why I really like those Dunlop Dunlop Tortex picks. I think they give you the right balance between having a good grip and the flexibility of a light gauge pick. So my recommendation would be to check out the description below and check out some of my links for the Dunlop acoustic guitar picks. Go order a bunch, get some so that you have a lot because they can break, they do wear down, and, and just get yourself a dozen of them to have at home. And I would maybe get some light picks in some medium picks. This way as your strumming hand loosens up and develops, you can graduate from that light pick to more of a medium sized pick and start having your strumming come alive. And just to let you guys know, I do have a free guitar crash course that if you're just getting started on the guitar and you want to learn how to get the basics down, strumming chords, learn some basic songs, check out the link in the description below for my free crash course.
